re.

II

ON my first dash to the Northern fighting line--Greer told me the other
night--I carried supplies to an ambulance where the surgeon asked me to
have a talk with an officer who was badly wounded and fretting for news
of his people in the east of France.

He was a young Frenchman, a cavalry lieutenant, trim and slim, with a
pleasant smile and obstinate blue eyes that I liked. He looked as if
he could hold on tight when it was worth his while. He had had a leg
smashed, poor devil, in the first fighting in Flanders, and had been
dragging on for weeks in the squalid camp-hospital where I found him. He
didn't waste any words on himself, but began at once about his family.
They were living, when the war broke out, at their country-place in
the Vosges; his father and mother, his sister, just eighteen, and his
brother Alain, two years younger. His father, the Comte de Rechamp,
had married late in life, and was over seventy: his mother, a good deal
younger, was crippled with rheumatism; and there was, besides--to
round off the group--a helpless but intensely alive and domineering
old grandmother about whom all the others revolved. You know how French
families hang together, and throw out branches that make new roots but
keep hold of the central trunk, like that tree--what's it called?--that
they give pictures of in books about the East.

Jean de Rechamp--that was my lieutenant's name--told me his family was
a typical case. "We're very _province_," he said. "My people live
at Rechamp all the year. We have a house at Nancy--rather a fine old
hotel--but my parents go there only once in two or three years, for a
few weeks. That's our 'season.'...Imagine the point of view! Or rather
don't, because you couldn't...." (He had been about the world a good
deal, and known something of other angles of vision.)

Well, of this helpless exposed little knot of people he had had no
word--simply nothing--since the first of August. He was at home, staying
with them at Rechamp, when war broke out. He was mobilised the first
day, and had only time to throw his traps into a cart and dash to the
station. His depot was on the other side of France, and communications
with the East by mail and telegraph were completely interrupted during
the first weeks. His regiment was sent at once to the fighting line,
and the first news he got came to him in October, from a communique in
a Paris paper a month old, saying: "The enemy yesterday retoo